Smart Cities and Sustainability: Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the second episode of Food Sustainability on AGILE Sustainability. In this episode, we are delighted to have William from Ezy Gardening share how to create your own home garden and grow more nutritious vegetables. More importantly, home gardens can serve as an additional food source for individual householders to increase food security, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when global supply chains are disrupted.The topics in this episode are:00m:40s: Motivation to start Ezy Gardening01m:47s: Hydroponics Farming and its advantages02m:35s: Kickstart home gardening with Ezy Gardening05m:00s: Available plants from Ezy Gardening06m:06s: Tricks to increase home garden productivity07m17s: Price differences between vegetables from home gardens and supermarketsOne of the highlights from William's sharing is the trick to increase the home garden's productivity. The trick is to reduce the influence of the surrounding environment. For example, if consumers want to grow more organic food, they could keep home gardens away from surrounding plants as much as possible. This is to avoid pests or accidental pesticide sprays from surrounding plants. If the influence from the surrounding environment is reduced, the grower machine from Ezy Gardening can more or less automate the growing process and generate higher yields.To learn more about William and Ezy Gardening, check out their website at ezy-gardening.com. Moreover, you can follow their latest updates on Facebook and Instagram.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of the new series Smart Cities and Sustainability on AGILE Sustainability. This episode will talk about the interesting activities to explore food sustainability in Singapore. You might find similar activities in your cities as well. The types of activities introduced are: Online and offline discussion meetings organized by the National Library Board Hackathons and Challenges like Singapore Design Awards Local Farm Tours and Volunteer Events Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi and Lesfm from Pixabay

Hello, and welcome to another episode on AGILE Sustainability.From the title of this episode smart city and sustainability, you might already notice something special about this episode. And you are right. I want to share a recent epiphany I had for sustainable development. It’s quite an interesting direction and I want to create a special series to explore more about it with you together.In this introduction episode, we will go through the motivation behind this series and the potential interesting topics we will explore.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi and Lesfm from Pixabay

Welcome to Episode 9 of AGILE Sustainability. Today, our guest speaker Grace from Greenview will take us on a journey that traverses the complex sustainability landscape.Grace is the managing partner of Greenview. The Greenview team are passionate about exploring unexplored territories to bring the most useful and effective tools to help customers transition to sustainability. And they aim to improve their products iteratively with an Agile approach to address customer needs and feedback. Grace will tell us more about their innovative products and services today.The topics in this podcast are:00m:55s: Introduction to Grace and Greenview01m:40s: Motivations to start a business on sustainability02m:50s: Surprise findings after starting the sustainability business04m:30s: Changes in sustainability practices over the years07m:20s: Changes in customer needs over the years13m:14s: Greenview products and services on sustainability18m:03s: Suggestions for businesses embracing sustainability transitionsOne of the highlights from Grace's sharing is the modern software portal they developed to help customers gain transparency on their environmental and social impacts. The Greenview team is dedicated to ensuring the accuracy of the data intelligence and insights they provide their customers. Moreover, they implement an elegant way to handle missing data by giving the customers a preview of the existing data they have as well as alerting them to the missing data gaps they need to solve to get a complete report.To learn more about Grace and Greenview, check out their website at greenview.sg.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

Today, we are going to continue to put the puzzle pieces together for episodes 5 to 8.EP5: Academic: Business Experiments for Sustainability Innovations by Ilka from Leuphana University of LuneburgEP6: Business Transitions to Agile Practices by David VarvelEP7: Influencer Marketing and Sustainability by Carmen and Mercedes from the University of ZaragozaEP8: SHIFT consumer behaviours to be more sustainable by David HardistyI will use the following structure to do the recap. Firstly, I will do a brief introduction to the speakers and their background. Then, I will share the questions we discussed in the episode. Following that, I will elaborate on one highlight from the speaker’s sharing.Music by Lesfm from Pixabay

Today, we are going to put the puzzle pieces together. In the future, we will continue to have this putting puzzle pieces together session when we gather enough interesting content. I hope these recap sessions will help new listeners quickly find the episode that interests them the most.Let’s first start with episodes 1 to 4.EP1: Sustainability and Software Development by Ramji from A Better ConsultancyEP2: Balancing Profitability and Sustainability by Garima from Georgia State UniversityEP3: Digital Sustainability by Simon from Singapore Management University, Handprint and Global Mangrove TrustEP4: Sustainability Reporting by Kristjan from Copenhagen Business SchoolI will use the following structure to do the recap. Firstly, I will do a brief introduction to the speakers and their background. Then, I will share the questions we discussed in the episode. Following that, I will elaborate on one highlight from the speaker’s sharing.Music by Lesfm from Pixabay

Welcome to Episode 8 of AGILE Sustainability. In this episode, we will switch our perspective from business to focus on consumers for a change, as a business can't transition to sustainability properly without the buy-in from its consumers.The speakers for the podcast, David Hardisty and his co-authors Katherine White and Rishad Habib proposed a SHIFT framework that could serve as a toolbox for practitioners to form business strategies to influence consumer behaviours on sustainability.The SHIFT framework includes the following factors: Social Influence Habit Formation Individual Self Feelings and Cognitions Tangibility The topics in this podcast are:00m58s: Introduction on David and his research focus01m25s: Motivations for building the SHIFT framework03m50s: Consumer behaviours' impact on the environment05m33s: SHIFT consumer behaviours walkthrough10m53s: Staring point to use the SHIFT framework13m03s: Things to avoid when forming strategies to influence consumers16m54s: Future opportunities for collaboration on the SHIFT frameworkOne of the highlights from David's sharing is to avoid guilt-tripping consumers when businesses form influence strategies on sustainability. One of the reasons to avoid guilt-tripping is that it might backfire and create resistance among consumers that will eventually drive them away. Instead, what businesses could do is to make sustainability behaviours very easy to achieve for consumers. For example, set the paperless option as default and provide an option to opt-out if users want to receive paper mail.Articles on the SHIFT framework The Elusive Green Consumer How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework Shifting consumer behavior to address climate change  To learn more about David's upcoming research, follow him on Twitter @dhardisty or check out his personal website and university profile. Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

Welcome to Episode 7 of AGILE Sustainability. Marketing is an important business activity. Therefore, it's useful for businesses to leverage marketing to serve corporate sustainability. To help our listeners explore this connection, we have invited Carmen and Mercedes from the University of Zaragoza to elaborate on this topic.Carmen and Mercedes investigated the correlation between different types of marketing and their ability to serve corporate sustainability. In specifics, Influencer Marketing and Relationship Marketing stand out as the more modern and effective channels to exert influences on sustainability.The topics in this podcast are: 00m57s: Comparison of Influencer and Relationship Marketing 03m54s: Relationship between marketing and corporate sustainability 05m39s: Challenges on serving corporate sustainability via marketing 08m10s: Influencer traits suitable to serve corporate sustainability 10m24s: Marketing considerations for the pursuit of corporate sustainability 18m15s: Marketing strategies for corporate sustainability One of the highlights from Carmen and Mercedes sharing is the ideal influencer traits on serving corporate sustainability. The three most important traits of an influencer are credibility, pleasantness, and emotions. Credibility affects how trustworthy the customers will feel about the delivered marketing message. Pleasantness helps to initiate a relationship between the brand and the customers. And last but not the least, emotions will help to strengthen and prolong the relationship in the long run. Businesses can look for or develop influencers based on these three ideal traits.To learn more about Carmen and Mercedes's research on this topic, you can read the article here.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

Welcome to Episode 6 of AGILE Sustainability. This is a very special episode as we are going to dive deeper into the Software Agile Practices and explore the implications of Sustainability Transitions for businesses. David Varvel, who's a super-experienced software practitioner on Agile practices, will take us on the journey of transforming businesses with Agile practices. He has abundant experience in applying Agile methodology in startups and large enterprises. In these projects, he witnessed the challenges that businesses faced while adopting Agile and how to overcome these challenges. Similar to Agile practices, sustainability introduces disruptive changes to business models and requires businesses to adapt quickly to survive.The topics in this podcast are: 01m08s: Introduction to David's experiences in Agile 03m23s: Benefits and Motivations for businesses to adopt Agile 05m54s: An Example of Agile Practices delivering value for businesses 09m54s: Challenges for businesses to adopt Agile 12m41s: Mindset Shifts when introducing Agile 15m13s: Scale new practices like Agile within an organization 19m53s: Transferrable lessons from adopting Agile to Sustainability One of the highlights from David's sharing is to be mindful of the conflicts between new and old practices during the transition. To scale new practices in the face of resistance, it's important to protect the seedling of change until it can withstand external hostility. One possible solution is to create a new environment to grow the team with new practices and to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that demonstrates the benefits of new practices. Subsequently, the seedling team and the MVP can serve as an example for future teams to learn and scale the new practices.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay

Welcome to Episode 5 of AGILE Sustainability. In this episode, we will talk about leveraging business experiments to derisk sustainability innovations with Ilka Weissbrod.Ilka is a sustainable innovation expert and researcher. She works closely with both academic researchers and business practitioners. One of her research elaborated on the benefits of business experimentation in facilitating sustainability transitions. Given the time sensitivity around sustainability transitions, business experiments can serve as a useful tool to derisk the business innovations on sustainability and iteratively polish the transition plan based on feedback from the experiments.The topics in this podcast are: 00m08s: Introduction to Ilka and her research 03m11s: Radical Innovations vs Normal Innovations 04m50s: Radical Innovations in Relation to Sustainability 08m32s: Example Radical Sustainability Innovations 09m52s: Barriers and Challenges Around Sustainability Innovations 11m18s: Business Capabilities that Help to Overcome the Barriers 13m39s: Templates to Design the Business Experiments 17m57s: Common Timespans for Business Experiments 19m27s: Keys to Promote Collaboration between Academic and Business Practitioners One of the highlights from Ilka's sharing is utilizing the Lean Startup methodology and Business Model Canvas as a template to design business experiments. When designing the experiments, businesses could quickly polish their business innovations by shortening the period of the experiment. At the same time, businesses could derisk radical innovations and gain confidence in the innovation among the organization by validating assumptions through business experiments.If you like this podcast, you can learn more about Ilka's experiences and research on her website.Find out the topics to be explored at https://www.agilesustainability.org/We would like to hear from you at [email protected] out to us for any questions or challenges you face in adopting sustainability solutions.Music by Wataboi from Pixabay